Thursday, December 15, 2016

Sometimes at this time of year it is hard to think of things that you don't hate, Xmas songs are one of the direst things out there is a load of dross and they are played endlessly from October till the 25th day of the 12 month.

When I was a kid I loved Snoopys Xmas, it built the anticipation, It also had the red baron which was technically war and killing so as a little boy I loved it, but now I work in retail and it is played every hour of every day, so sod it Snoopy I hope your Sopwith Camel bites the dust

Monday, December 8, 2014

Whoops and here is a very old post I forgot to hit the publish button on from a year or two ago

Okay, decided to spend the day making paper bricks out of the junkmail,
Basically you rip all the junk mail into small bits, throw it into a bucket of water. then stick them into a press and squeeze the water out, then let lay them out to dry in the sunshine, and then you have a pile of paper bricks to burn in winter.
Anyway halfway through my assistants arrived and dived right in, literally, jumping in the buckets and tearing the paper up.
Next step is putting it in the press

.

Basically you rip all the junk mail into small bits, throw it into a bucket of water. then stick them into a press and squeeze the water out, then let lay them out to dry in the sunshine, and then you have a pile of paper bricks to burn in winter.

good use of the junkmail but is pretty bloody time consuming.

All good fun till Alex spotted a lego advert in a Warehouse mailer that Lottie was busily stomping underfoot, then there was a furious session of pulling paper out of each others buckets and slapping each other with wet paper

Well 2014 is nearly over and I have achieved absolutely nothing, I'm still not a successful author my great novel of the human condition "Ernesto Bertorelli and the chihuahua of doom", my singing career is non-existant owing to the fact i can't sing and as for acting, I am probably the only Kiwi who hasn't appeared in a Lord of the rings movie, although I was followed around the backyard by a group of hot chicks yesterday, unfortunately they were of the feathered variety!.

So on to more realistic goals, I still don't have a full time job, I have had lots of temping work, I am slowly in the process of killing assorted vege gardens round the house in the vain hope of saving money by growing me own vege.

Saturday, August 10, 2013

Picked up a couple of ex battery chooks from Lichfield last weekend, here's one of the little chappettes

They actually look a lot better than the last lot I got, although the comb and wattle are an extremely pale pink and their beaks are a bit odd.

They are fairly timid still, the last lot were much more nosey, mind you the weather is a lot colder at the mo and they have come from a place that was probably heated 24/7 so we will see what happens.

Around October last year i got my previous battery hens, who looked like the above

and this what the surviving one looks like today

Although its not the best picture her comb and wattle are a lot redder than they seem here.

Flicking through Trademe, I saw a laptop with no reserve that seemed to be the model up from my deceased laptop, thinking i could probably combine the two to get a working laptop, I though a $5 bid on it.

A Bargain at twice the price!

And as you can see I won it for the princely sum of $2.50.

So once I had paid $12 shipping it came to $14.50, still cheap, although it could turn out to be a $14.50 paperweight if it doesn't actually go.

It arrived a few days later neatly packaged, opened it up, and there was the first problem, it used an Intel chip whereas my deceased lappie uses AMD, Oh well excepting the motherboard all the other bits should be compatible.

So i plug it in using my laptop adapter and it posts to the Compaq screen, which is to be expected given there is no hard drive.

Next up I try a Live Linux distro I have lying around on CD, put that in and in a few minutes I am in a linux desktop.

So, so far it works, however a live linux distro on CD is ok for the basics but you can't update things, save settings etc which is a bit of a nusiance everytime you reboot so I decided to try a distro on a USB thumbdrive, I chose Puppy Linux as it small and not too taxing on older machines. Only problem is older laptops/PCs don't support booting from a USB port.

Once again Linux to the rescue, I downloaded PLOP Bootmanager and burnt it to CD, popped the PLOP cd in my CD drive and rebooted the computer. when the computer rebooted, the CD started the PLOP bootmanager with this pretty wee screen

(yes i have cropped the image the actual screen is lovely and crisp looking not at all blurry :) )
Now i have the option to boot from USB, so here we go.

The Puppy Linux Boot Screen

and finally a working desktop

And thats all there was to it $14.50 plus a USB stick and a few parts I had lying around and i have a working laptop.

But wait theres more.
After a bit of use the laptop sounds like a jet trying to take off, so i dismantled it and gave it a clean out, got a bit of dust out etc, reassembeld and still lots of noise, which is odd as my dead laptop was lovely and quiet, went and had a check online, take a wild guess what was listed as one of the Cons of this particular laptop, Noise, as it using a desktop CPU rather than a laptop CPU so the fan is having to really work to keep it lovely and cool.